What makes this part of the world so horrifically reactionary?

Lack of industry multiplied by the sum of poverty and colonial politics.

the kikes of israel and amerikkka

It's strategic necessity makes it a desirable location to control in the name of western interests and since the popular will of that region is necessarily opposed to those interests they foster reactionary by sympathetic (or at least manageably-hostile) groups in order to facilitate their control.

I blame the bahamas personally.

To be honest this is the best reason.

It's use for oil is waning, but it's location is still convenient.

It's the center of the world. A trade hotspot.

Take the blinkers off then take a guess.

Protip: in the past they were aligned, in fact they were the creators of our current interests.

In fact the western civilisation's cradle was mesopotamia. Without Sumer, Babylon and Egypt, we'd be speaking Chinese.

so we just going to ignore the greeks, plato, Aristotle, bunch of nobo0dies.

Colonialism
"neo" imperialism
Corruption
Rise of far right extremism in response to the above
Western response to said extremism
So on and so fourth

Gee and I wonder what's changed?

That's Pakistan, it's not even highlighted in the OPs picture

Sumer started around 5000 BC, 4000 years before the Greeks.

Twice the length of time between us and the Romans.

That blows my mind.

A reeeeeaaaaaaalllllyyy long time ago.

Mesoptoamia fell one hundred years before Socrates was around. And that's after 2500 years of regional dominance.

the big difference between the west and the east was the enlightenment.
secularization, taking into consideration non Christians can have good ideas too.
Saudi arabia is literally a monarchy in 2016….
The only muslim philosopher to come close to a middle eastern enlightenment thought was Averroes

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Averroes

he is even in the painting of platos school.

The western world embraced non christian ideas and this allowed technology and thoughts to evolve

Mesopotamia is still ethnically similar.
And Islam has molded itself into the Mesopotamian culture (like Christianity in Europe).

Memes don't simply disappear without ALOT of effort.

And Europes pagan memes are significantly similar to mesopotamian and even central asian memes.

Hell.. we have similar religious memes to Buddhism in China.

I suggest that we HAD to have had a common origin and are similar today in alot of ways except minute specifics (look at how Japan modernized for example).

You can use the ethnicity argument against Negroes, but not to our similar brethren in the east. We simply just look different.

I mean, that's a long fucking time. Consider that Thales died around 500 years before Christ.

This triggers the anti-western SJWs

We are not that young relative to the average human age. We've had a HUGE amount of civilisations that have come and gone.
We really need to pay attention to why they fell.
Start with Sumer and the Babylonians after.
Then the Canaanites.

Africans and Native Amercans, Indigenous Australians and Polynesians do not like the fact that Eurasians had civilization a lot longer than they did.

And we've had the same pyramidal hierarchy too ever since Sumer. King, lords, peasants.

It's the meme we struggle to break. It's like it's a constant.

I read Gilgamesh once. I actually really liked it.
It's offensive as fuck though kek

This, basically. It's like asking why the trenches in WWI weren't great places to live. Both the US and to a lesser extent Russia have been busy handing out weapons like candy to all their favorite "good guys" so they can kill each other for the last 50 years.

The Aztecs had a pretty advanced civilization for their circumstances.
Its just also they needed to kill people for the sun god…

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You're saying you didn't get my point? Let me be clear then. Islam is the reason the ME is ass-backwards. Not Israel. Not colonialism. Not imperialism, poverty or drought. Not despotic leaders. Not nazis or fascists. Islam. Islam is your problem.

Yeah this shit is pretty mind blowing. Their written history starts about the same time as Egypt's, around 3500BC. To think that both civilizations stood for a period greater than that since jebus days is staggering.

I'm not convinced by the pyramids being older than say 3000BC, and this is having read Hancock but yeah, even at that Egyptian civilization is downplayed. I mean they were clearly an advanced society before they started building these fuckers and their maths and astronomy skills were alien.

So why has Islam been a problem in the last 50 or so years? Hell, less than that.
It's no different to the rise of the far right in the west, capitalism destroys peoples lives and the spooked proles look towards extremism to fill the void.

aztec's feats in engineering and agriculture surpassed that of modern european's at the time.

the aztecs had no horses so they literally never used the wheel, they literally had special guys who could run fast to deliver messages,

Islam has always been a barbaric expanding religion, they took over spain for like 700 years till the Spanish Christians woke up from thier siesta and went super saiyan during the reconquista

There's a reason why civilization started at the crossroads of all three species.

It was the perfect mix.

And Eurasians still have that mix distributed.

The ones in Giza aren't I think.
The older ones are basically sand nowadays built by many smaller bricks.

And I don't see why that would be so difficult.
Furthermore, in such a time, the spiritual push to create such things would be greater than today's push to build similar things. Remember: they honestly thought they HAD to appease gods, including the pharaoh.

Read my previous post.
7000 years had passed between the initial settlements and Egypt. 3.5 times the age between Rome and now.

Think of the advances we've made in that short time.
Then think of the advances that they had.

Also, that knowledge was only kept to elites back then.

Similar to what they do now with some """trade secrets"""

true, but they also lived on top of a swamp and managed to cultivate the land to produce food for their population, they also had genius methods of delivering fresh water through canal systems around mountains.

They also were many thousands of years AFTER eurasians hehe.

Seriously, we beat you fuckers.

But honestly, why does it matter.

I'm not even mexican lol, I was just pointing out that some south american civilizations were more advanced than europeans in certain branches of production, and other fields (astronomy, engineering).

WE WUZ

Protip: they always lagged.

You can't just get rid of a 7000 years of technological time lag like that.

yes that's bait paco

thought*
fucking beer.

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MATERIAL CONDITIONS
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Learn to dialectical materialism and historical materialism, m8. Get into Marx and Engels.

Yes it can.

Memes don't just randomly appear. They DEVELOP on the past memes.

The only reason Islam appeared peaceful is because they had subjugated everyone who lived in their caliphate. And even then there was near constant invasion into Europe. Islam has been since its inception spread by the sword.

Only in times of instability.

There were times where it prospered and was even better than western europe.

UAE might be an example.
Indonesia/malaysia too.

this

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Countries like Iran were actually pretty modern until the US and UK fucked everything up repeatedly because reactionary despots don't mind selling them crude oil. Britain is also responsible for the existence of the KSA, which the modern US defends as a staunch "ally" even after it effectively admitted involvement in 9/11.

In other words, the Anglosphere are meddling idiots and the rest of the Western world has to live with it.

Early caliphates were obviously barbaric by modern standards, but so were most European nations. The most violent religious conflicts in human history were between different sects of Christianity; the Taiping Rebellion almost tore China to pieces.

Cyprus, Lebanon, Palestine, Kurds, Armenia and so on, are all reactionary.

Fuck off pol!

Oh! Also, ask US why they didn't like a seccular Iran.

"bbb-b-b-but other religions were bad too mom"- islam

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What is free will, lad?

CIA killed all the communists.
Government repression in the region typically left the church alone. religious groups became the strongest surviving force in the region.
lastly, they have plenty of reason to be dissatisfied with the West.

pol detected

Which makes it all the more impressive that they had such an advanced civilization

Yeah they are bad

What I don't get is why these retards keep holding Islam, and by that extension all middle eastern countries, to a compeltly different standard

Oh but TU QUOQUE FAGGOT! Just because im not not consistent doesn't mean Islam isn't the worse thing in the world.

Because if the US hadn't done something, we probably would have a nightmare scenario of either the Soviets still being around, or the entire Middle East being turned into a totalitarian Communist state, at which point they could probably overrun Europe

What the actual fuck are you talking about?

You gotta be kidding me. Literally the first act of Mohammeds tribe was to annihilate another tribe. The reason there were relatively few conflicts within the Islamic world till WWI was the Pax Ottomania.

By hijacking Sasanian, Byzantine and Greek culture. The middle east used to be more prosperous than the West since the split of the Roman Empire.
It is true that Islam in its golden age was comparatively tolerant as long as the central authority aka the caliphate was intact. Once you remove the philosopher king, the conflation between religious and political authority is a dangerous cocktail.

they used the wheel on toys.
The greeks also used runners to deliver messages, and they definitely had horses. Over long distances, humans are just about as fast and more reliable than a single horse, they also handle rough terrain better. in Modern endurance riding (read modern horses), Horses run for about 100 miles in a one day race, and the first place is usually around 14 hours. These races include periodic stops for veterinarians to check on the horses and for the rider to rest. Horses pushed this hard will run themselves to death if they aren't held back. these riders can also chose whatever breed they want from the world's diversity. as a comparison, the Spartathalon, a 153 mile race, has a world record of 20 hours 25 minutes. if you apply that 14 hour pace to 153, it would actually come in behind the record holding human even if it could keep that pace without rest. so, for deliver messages, runners are actually preferable to single horses. The Achaemenid Persian empire did have a sophisticated system of waystations where messengers could switch horses to let them deliver messages quickly.

Im not sure if you are aware friend but the first act of any government, tribe or new religion is the annihilation of someone else. You are holding Islam up to a different standard to other religions.

Yeah….and?

Yeah…and? Thats true of any country

Holla Forums pls
deserts mean life is hard, surpluses must be guarded jealously. it's really not that hard to wrap your head around. it was reactionary before western imperialism and may well be afterward.

religious extremism

This is the stupidest post on this thread

what exactly do you think reactionary means?
congrats on being wrong on three levels
Georgraphically, the middle east has plenty of non-desert, arable land.
Historically, the region has been rise to many advanced societies, such as the Byzantines, Persians, and Phonecians
and it makes no sense to call fuedal kingdoms and sultanates reactionary, in a time where 80% of the world's population is governed as feudal kingdoms, and most of the remaining as primitive anarchy.

Without reading any of the comments, if any of you blamed "muh imperialism" or "the whiteys" you're fucking retarded.

Fucking white male detected

Is the ypg flag ironic?

No, because only in Islam state and religion are merged. Christianity for example always made a distinction between the heavenly kingdom and the earthly kingdom.

Islam defines it's sphere of influence from the top to the bottom, meaning it can be tolerant towards religious minorities under its rule, but makes almost no compromises insofar that areas can only be considered Muslim when they are brought into the Dār al-Islām, the regions politically controlled by said religion.

Christiany was originally a concept from the bottom to the top, with being underground and stuff. You can see this in the Crusades, while Christians simply cared about the access to the Sepulchrum for pilgrims, the loss of Jerusalem for Islam was unbearable because it removed the political superiority over the city even though Muslims weren't even a majority in it.

And despite that, a disruption of earthly governments resulted in total fucking chaos for most of Europe's history.

And despite that, Jews and Christians have lived in Islamic areas, including Jerusalem, for thousands of years.

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It all started with Sykes-Picot.
The borders of most countries in the middle east don't make any sense in terms of ethnic and cultural relationships. They created states and governments with, for example, shiite's in power, like in Syria, in a sunni majority country. The goal of the middle east borders was to divide and conquer, make the Muslims infighting so that the western powers could control its resources.

Every time a political power got well organized with some popular support they wanted to nationalize the resources and that is scary for the west because middle east oil extraction is one of the most lucrative businesses in the world. The cost of production is very low there while the price of selling is set by the marginal producers. If I'm not wrong the profit of the middle eastern oil is close to the French GDP. Therefore, they had to foment the coup's in Iran, Iraq, Syria and Egypt.

The religious fanatics are a good thing for the west because it doesn't affect that much the oil production, since even the religious leaders like Abu Bakr are always dependent on west money.

imperialism did foment local conflicts. Why are kurds and other ethnic groups divided in different nations under Sykes-Picot?

New borders are necessary to end much of the conflict and to establish stable societies.

Pretty much this.

also averroes was really a mufti by profession, how close is that to enlightenment?

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Islam is the perfect religion to control the masses.

meme is meme

So is Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Belgium, Holland, etc.

No nation should be a monarchy in 2016

Because non-monarchies are so much better, right?

that's the purpose of any other religion, specially the abrahamic ones. Islam is not that different from them.

People's Mujahideen of Iran is one of the most bad ass revolutionary movements of the 20th century.

t. read Shariati

Yes

Try again.

Can you give a specific example of what you mean and how this would be related to Christianity?

You didn't really understand what I said, did you?

Well that was their goal, duh. They didn't even know what Islam was until they went there…

What does quality of life or any other positive has to do with monarchies?
Are you retarded?

Well, we're talking about which system is a better place to live, right? You said that non-monarchies are better than monarchies, I gave an example where they're not.

Whether a country is a republic or a constitutional monarchy makes little difference, just as there's not much difference between an absolute monarchy and a presidential dictatorship.

I was gonna contradict this but actually it's kinda right

Brits empowered Wahhabists to fuck over the Ottomans, and the US has been bankrolling Saudi Arabia for decades

The greeks did not have nearly the influence that mesopotamia did. It is considered a big deal in Europe because it is the first european civlized area.

On a world-level, it is not all that early at all. Am i supposed to be impressed that the Greeks managed to understand the pythogorean theorem that babylonians had developed 1500 years prior?

This is a pretty good materalist essay on the politics of the region and the internal contradictions of Islam written from the early 1980s:

struggle.ws/issues/war/afghan/pamwt/wt2/lakhdar.html

they've been dealing with neo-cohen's longer than we have.

[shitposting intesifies]
or do you really know fuck all about history?

If that ever came to pass (which it wouldn't), Turkey would probably stay neutral, and Israel would just act as one gigantic cork until the rest of NATO got boots on the ground.

Most arguments for Islam being the main/only reason the ME sucks rely on this to be false, which makes it a perfectly fair argument.